As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Many information handling systems use keyboards to obtain user input. Some prior keyboard solutions have provided pressure sensitive keys. The most common technique to provide pressure sensitive keys is to use variable resistance sensing techniques to provide an indication of the pressure applied by a user to a key. Variable capacitance sensing has also been utilized in some prior art products such as console gamepad controllers. While pressure sensitive buttons have been used before, improved techniques and control of pressure sensitive keys are still needed, particularly for gaming keyboards.
A computer peripheral produced in the form of a joystick controller has been developed that allows a computer user to map up to three computer keyboard keys or a combination of such keys to the joystick movement such that the keys or combination of keys is indicated to the computer by how far the joystick is moved along a given axis (i.e. by percentage of maximum joystick travel). Such a joystick controller is an external peripheral that is separate and different from the computer keyboard functions by performing a simple software mapping. Today's legacy USB keyboards support a single scan code per key.
Keyboard macro button support has also been provided for gaming keyboards by assigning a macro to a physical macro key. The key physically is attached to the keyboard's legacy scan matrix and uses unused row/column intersection points and uses an unassigned scan code per macro key. In such a configuration, if the keyboard has 5 macro keys, which are attached to the legacy scan matrix, the keyboard can only support 5 macros, or one macro per key.